In a way, Grouptivity represents an evolution of the “Email a Friend” button! Email a Friend/Tell a friend/Forward to a Friend functionality probably represents the earliest form of content sharing.  This functionality first appeared during the Web 1.0 era and fast become a best practice amount content providers (and marketers) and one of the first form of online viral marketing.

Even today, forwarding content to a friend continues to be a very popular activity.  News articles are the second most popular category of content that users forward. According to Sharpe Partners (Jan 2006),  56% of participants in a focus group attested to forwarding news articles to friends. (Jokes and cartoons were the number one category with 88% of respondents admitting to forwarding jokes or cartoons to friends or co-workers).  Health care and medical information came in third with 32%.

Grouptivity provides all of the same functionality found in the original “Email a Friend” but takes it to the next level! Webware’s Rafe Needleman does a great job of explaining how the company has redefine the “Email This” button.

Unlike other E-mail This buttons, the Grouptivity tool sends the story to a public repository, a Digg-like site called iPond. On this site, users can see what the most e-mailed items are from all of Grouptivity’s users. iPond also helps a bit with SEO for the sites that use it, since it’s a giant page of links that, hopefully, will get used by a lot of people.

By marrying the Email a Friend function with a public repository of content and by creating a discussion community around content through its power set of tools and services aimed at publishers, you can definitely see how Grouptivity is putting the 2.0 in Email a Friend 2.0!